ElevenLabs plans to spend a double-digit percentage of the amount it has raised in India, chief executive Mati Staniszewski told CNBC-TV18 on 6 October 2026. CNBC-TV18 puts the amount raised at close to $1 billion and reports that he described the India spend as amounting to “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The same reports say India is now ElevenLabs’s second-largest market after the US and that its global revenue has crossed a $600 million annual run rate. They give no dollar total for the India spend, no timeline, and no split beyond three headings: model development, local teams and work on Indian languages.
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The key insight: CNBC-TV18’s reports state the India commitment as a share rather than a sum: a double-digit percentage of the amount ElevenLabs has raised, which CNBC-TV18 puts at close to $1 billion. “Hundreds of millions of dollars” is Staniszewski’s description of that spend as CNBC-TV18 reports it, and the reports give no dollar total, timeline or split. We set the statements next to each other as the reports give them.
CNBC-TV18’s Ritu Singh reports that the London-based company plans to spend a double-digit percentage of the amount it has raised, which the report puts at close to $1 billion, on the region. The report says Staniszewski said the investment would cover model development, local teams and work on Indian languages.
A second CNBC-TV18 report of the same day words the base differently: it says the company “recently raised close to $1 billion.” It adds that Staniszewski said the investment will go beyond sales, and that ElevenLabs wants to build its models, engineering capabilities and product infrastructure with India in mind from the beginning, rather than treating the country as an afterthought.
ElevenLabs’s own blog post of 30 September says the company closed a $300 million employee tender offer that values it at $22 billion, double its valuation at its Series D in February. CNBC-TV18’s report of 6 October on the company’s IPO plans says the Series D raised $500 million at an $11 billion valuation. It describes a tender offer as one that lets employees and existing shareholders sell part of their holdings, providing liquidity without necessarily bringing fresh capital into the company.
InsideAI News, in a rewrite of the Reuters report, says ElevenLabs is open to merger and acquisition targets in India but declined to name any candidates. The CNBC-TV18 reports we read do not mention acquisitions.
Left: the number of Indian languages on Eleven V4 against the 22 officially recognised ones, as the Economic Times gives them. Right: how CNBC-TV18 reports the spending commitment.
India Is Its Second-Largest Market
CNBC-TV18 reports that India has emerged as ElevenLabs’s second-largest market after the US, and that global revenue has crossed a $600 million annual run rate. The Economic Times, reporting from the company’s Bengaluru Summit on 6 October, says India is what ElevenLabs “calls its biggest market outside the US.”
Staniszewski said enterpriserevenue has now crossed revenue from self-serve customers and accounts for 55% of the company’s total business, CNBC-TV18 reports. It adds that he attributed the shift to voice AI becoming reliable enough for large-scale enterprise deployment. ElevenLabs’s blog post of 30 September also gives 55% as the enterprise share of revenue.
CNBC-TV18’s report of 6 October on the IPO plans says ElevenLabs said its agents now handle more than 15 million conversations a week, three times the level recorded in February. The first report says Staniszewski wants the company to operate as the “interaction layer” for the agentic economy, with an offering that goes beyond the models to include integrations, deployment and monitoring.
The Economic Times reports that Eleven V4, the company’s latest text-to-speech model, launched the week before and supports 14 Indian languages. It says ElevenLabs plans to extend its technology to all 22 officially recognised Indian languages “in the coming months.” Our earlier report on Eleven v4 looks at what its latency numbers measure.
Staniszewski pointed to Physicswallah in education, Cars24 and Razorpay in customer support and sales workflows, and Havells’ smart home application, CNBC-TV18 reports. The Economic Times says JioStar was among the company’s first customers in India and names Pocket FM and Hubbles among the firms it works with. It also says ElevenLabs is building local teams, working with government and nonprofit organisations, and partnering with the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities on technology to restore the voices of people who have lost them because of illness or injury.
The Jobs Angle: From Level One to Level Two
CNBC-TV18 reports that Staniszewski said conversational AI is approaching human-level performance in some applications and is already comparable with humans in basic level-one customer support. It says he expects broader improvements in conversational quality over the next six to 12 months.
The report says the development is expected to affect India’s business process outsourcing industry, particularly jobs involving repetitive and scripted customer calls. It says Staniszewski said such work is likely to shift from level-one customer support towards level-two and level-three roles involving more complex interactions and emotional understanding.
He also said AI agents and human employees would increasingly work together, with humans supervising calls and intervening when required, the report says. It adds that ElevenLabs already uses this model for inbound sales qualification and is working with BPO companies on similar applications.
On disclosure, the report says Staniszewski said companies should currently disclose when a customer is speaking to AI, and that he expects the requirement to become less important as consumers get used to it. It says he also suggested customers could be given a choice between an AI agent and waiting for a human employee.
The Structural Read
The reports state the spend in three layers. The base is the amount raised, which CNBC-TV18 puts at close to $1 billion in one report and describes in another as what the company “recently raised close to $1 billion.” The share is a double-digit percentage. The description is “hundreds of millions of dollars.” The reports do not say which funding rounds make up the base.
The India plan is reported alongside the company’s enterprise shift. CNBC-TV18 reports that enterpriserevenue has crossed self-serve revenue and makes up 55% of the total business, and says the growing enterpriseopportunity is also influencing how ElevenLabs is investing in India. The customers CNBC-TV18 names in India are Physicswallah, Cars24, Razorpay and Havells.
The third strand in the reports is about work. CNBC-TV18 reports Staniszewski’s view that repetitive, scripted level-one calls are likely to shift towards level-two and level-three roles, with humans supervising AI agents and stepping in when required. The reports give no job numbers.
Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs CEO, to CNBC-TV18
“India can be a laboratory for voice AI.”
Three Implications
THE SUM IS A DESCRIPTION Staniszewski’s “hundreds of millions of dollars” describes a double-digit share of a base the reports give as close to $1 billion. No dollar total, schedule or split appears in the reports.
INDIA IS A MARKET AND A BUILD LOCATION CNBC-TV18 reports that the spend covers model development, local teams and work on Indian languages, and that ElevenLabs is building a local presence across go-to-market, engineering, research and forward-deployed engineering.
THE JOBS SHIFT IS HIS STATED EXPECTATION The shift from level-one to level-two and level-three work is Staniszewski’s expectation as CNBC-TV18 reports it. The reports give no job counts.
What Is Not Established
None of the reports we read gives a dollar total for the India spend, a timeline, or a split between model development, local teams and Indian languages. They do not say which funding rounds make up the “close to $1 billion,” and they give no India revenue figure beyond the second-largest-market ranking. “Hundreds of millions of dollars” is Staniszewski’s description of the spend as CNBC-TV18 reports it.
We did not hear the interviews; we read CNBC-TV18’s written accounts, which mostly paraphrase him. Reuters also reported the story under the headline “AI firm ElevenLabs to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in India,” but its page was not available to us, so nothing here comes from its text. ElevenLabs’s blog index, as we read it on 6 October, listed no post about the India plan; the most recent entry was dated 30 September. We did not contact ElevenLabs.
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ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski told CNBC-TV18 on 6 October 2026 that the company plans to spend a double-digit percentage of the amount it has raised, which CNBC-TV18 puts at close to $1 billion, on India, and described the spend as “hundreds of millions of dollars.” CNBC-TV18 also reports that India is the company’s second-largest market after the US and that global revenue has crossed a $600 million annual run rate. The reports give no dollar total, timeline or split for the India spend.
A note on sourcing. This piece rests on three written reports by CNBC-TV18 of its interviews with ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski on 6 October 2026, which we read in full, and on InsideAI News’s rewrite of the Reuters report, also read in full. We also read the first item of the Economic Times’s ETtech Top 5 newsletter, from the company’s Bengaluru Summit, and the opening paragraphs of ElevenLabs’s own blog post of 30 September.
We did not hear the interviews, and CNBC-TV18’s accounts mostly paraphrase the CEO. Reuters’s own page was not available to us, so nothing here comes from its text. We did not contact ElevenLabs and we haven’t checked the reported figures independently. Nothing here is a forecast, and nothing here is financial or investment advice.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
